Descriptions

This thesis examines notions of social unintelligibility produced within queer spaces in two primary texts: Justin Torres' We the Animals and Mario Bellatín's Beauty Salon. Chapter One discusses the racial and queer marginalization of the unnamed narrator and explores his turn towards an "animal language" in his moment of exposure before his family. In order to articulate the family's misrecognition of the narrator, I read the final scene of the novel through Judith Butler's "Giving An Account of Oneself." Chapter Two examines the ways in which the queer, isolated community in Beauty Salon experiences social unintelligibility as they are threatened by violence of the outside world. In this chapter, I employ Butler's notions of precarity and mourning to show how the community’s need to mourn is disavowed and their relationality with others is foreclosed. Finally, I am attentive to the ways in which the narratives loosen up at the conclusion of both We the Animals and Beauty Salon. Each of these endings lacks closure and the characters' futures remain ambiguous -- and, in turn, create the possibility for new connections and becomings.

description.provenance : Rejected by Julie Kurtz(julie.kurtz@oregonstate.edu), reason: Rejecting to revise the page numbers. The actual thesis should start on page 1, and the changes should be made in the Table of Contents. Remove the page numbers in the pretext pages.
Everything else looks good. Once revised, log back into ScholarsArchive and go to the upload page. Replace the attached file with the revised file and resubmit.
Thanks,
Julie on 2015-09-28T18:26:57Z (GMT)